


There Aren't Any Stars in the Sky

by Ambrosia



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Force Bond, I'm trash you're trash we're all trash, Shared Dreams, and I kinda really ship it i'm awful okay, but also kinda one-sided, idk man i'm the trash lord lord of the trash heap, it's shippy if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 19:43:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5510618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ambrosia/pseuds/Ambrosia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Why are you here?” Rey asks. She appears to be meditating. Even his muscles remember the basics. Her eyes are peacefully closed.</p><p>“Your mind is most open when you Jedi meditate, ‘letting everything go’,” he tells her, striding around in a vicious, predatory circle. “Which you would know if you had an at least halfway-competent teacher.”</p><p>Her eyes remained closed, but she almost snorts at him. Snorts. “Right.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	There Aren't Any Stars in the Sky

“I see your island,” he tells her, leaning in close. “Your sea. Han Solo. You see him as a father figure, something that you never had. He will disappoint you.”

He clenches his fists and keeps a tight hold on his power, but it is fed is by memories of a father that was always gone, a father that sent him away. A father that has not come looking for his dead son.

It’s a difficult thing, prying a person’s mind open. It’s draining, and yet also claustrophobic. He knows from experience that simply shoving hard enough, hurting enough, will break even the best walls. Even on memories that someone would hold close to their chests. Except that when he pushes, she clamps down on him, holds him down, drowning him, and then shoves him violently away. Follows him back.

Kylo Ren hasn’t felt the touch of another gifted in the greater part of a decade. He feels fear in his heart for the first time in a while, but pushes it down, pushes it away, because he is the First Knight of the Knights of Ren, and the person before him, apparently gifted though she may be, is as untrained as a toddler.

He regrets his evaluation almost the moment that he thinks it.

The more he pushes against her mind, the more strength this girl from Jakku seems to find. He doesn’t even have a name to attach to a face, even though he has revealed his own, until he finds it. Etched into her mind like a blaster shot through thin paper. Rey.

He tries again, pushing harder. Rey meets him, keeps them there in the middle. Every time he shifts and gains ground, she immediately takes it back. Every second that passes, he has a little less of the upper ground, and he knows it.

“You fear being weak,” she snaps, pushing further, harder. Somehow her mind stays completely united with no weak points, and yet manages to stab holes into his. “That you’ll never be as great as he was. As Darth Vader.”

She can _see him_. That’s the thought that occurs to him, as he recoils in shock. Not just his face, though that is bad enough. She has peered into his head and seen the conflict there, how hard he’s being ripped apart by one side or the other. His failings. He knows that he would likely be able to outlast her, but somehow being looked _through_ makes him hesitate.

That’s the start, he knows. The start of everything.

He must have pushed too hard into her mind. Rey. Hardly older than a child, compared to him. He feels it when Han Solo falls into the abyss, dead, even over the wrenching of one half of his soul from the other. He hears her scream inside his own head as if she had been at his side. If Ben Solo had lived, even as just a flicker or a pause inside Kylo Ren, he is dead now.

Their battle after is an intense, yet unsophisticated one. Kylo is angry and broken, and Rey is angry and untrained. The pair of them make an unsteady, unstable match. It possibly doesn’t help that his right arm is steadily bleeding down his side.

“I could teach you,” he pleads, holding their blades together and listening to them scream. He’s almost desperate for it. Panicking. He doesn’t want to be on opposite sides, she has so much potential and doesn’t even know it. “I could be your teacher! I could show you the way of the Force!”

The blue of her lightsaber, the lightsaber that by all rights should be his, casts a neon halo around her head in the frozen forrest. She closes her eyes for a moment, and he feels the Force shift around them.

Pain makes him stronger. Jedi ignore pain, let it wash over them and let it go, but Sith, they use it. And despite their fight, he’s in a considerable amount of pain. But when Rey opens her eyes and he can feel the Force shifting, she hits him with everything all at once. And it’s all Kylo can do to block the assault.

He goes down, eventually, and fears for one moment that his death might be imminent. His wounds are too bad, and the planet itself is breaking. If it had been him, Rey would have been dead instantaneously, but she runs. Runs back to her Stormtrooper. Flees the call for more blood that he can feel _through_ her. And yet she turns away. She runs.

Kylo Ren loses consciousness with his injured side planted firmly in the snow, only to wake up in the med-bay of Phasma’s freighter.

His chest hurts. It could be just the simple press of hands against his wound, making him bite against his own lip so hard that he bleeds. He expected that the death of Solo would have solidified him in the dark, and yet all he can feel is grief. It takes him a moment to realize that it doesn’t seem to belong to him.

Physical pains do not bother him. Pain feeds easily into anger and frustration, which just gives him more drive. But still, his wounds take time to heal after Starkiller, and Supreme Leader’s guidance does not help this.

It also does not help that he can sense her moods even from millions of miles across the galaxy. He’d originally thought it delirium, from his wounds. Except it’s worse in his sleep. It’s even worse when they both sleep at the same time. Occasionally, he’ll wake up and for a moment is in a bedroom that does not belong to him.

But Kylo breathes, slow and deep, oddly Sith and Jedi use the same technique, and he’s in his own bed again.

The Force allows him connection to others, the ability to sense where they are, some aspects of their condition, sometimes even their thoughts if they know do not know how to shield their mind, but never so clearly across this distance. He can feel every shiver, every tired twitch, every bead of sweat that forms along her arms or forehead even as he stands before Supreme Leader Snoke and is thankful that he dresses in so many layers and hides his face.

He has to grit his teeth from behind his mask, listening to Hux prop himself up while putting others down, because he feels calm sea air against his cheek. Even though Kylo wears his mask and is in the company of his Supreme Master, deep within his dark rooms.

If he tried hard enough, he could close it. Clamp down on it like one of the automatic doors in his ship and sever it permanently. This is probably what his Master would instruct him to do.

Kylo convinces himself that he lets it remain open for a purpose, that being able to maintain even a slight connection would feed the Knights of Ren information that they needed.

So it stays open.

Most times, it’s hard. Rey is young in her training, and like all apprentices, the beginning is often the most difficult part. And she is of the Light, which means that she must process her feelings and let them go. Unlike him. He feels everything so deeply and lets it burn inside his chest. Kylo Ren lets nothing go. He can call up his anger any time he needs to, because his stores run bone-deep.

He can smell cooling fluid while he’s staring at General Hux as he makes yet another recovery report after Starkiller. His hands blister from some sort of menial task. He feels laughter tickling against his throat, and it makes him frown.

His training with the Supreme Leader has increased ten-fold, driven by his kill. Kylo severed the last connection to his dead self, and even though his punishment for failure was great, his Master is convinced that he will become stronger for it. His duels with the other Knights of Ren are harder, last longer, and end bloodier than before. In those moments when Kylo is out of breath and panting and seething with it, he can feel the thrum from the other side of the galaxy. Like metal reverberating into his chest.

And then sometimes it is so easy he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it, until he feels the ocean breeze shifting his black cloak.

They have occasionally shared dreams, yes, but this appears to be more. As far as Kylo knows, they are both conscious, and this dreamscape looks as real as anything that he’s ever experienced. He can even feel Rey behind him, calm. Usually she bites back the moment she senses his presence.

“Why are you here?” Rey asks. She appears to be meditating. Even his muscles remember the basics. Her eyes are peacefully closed.

“Your mind is most open when you Jedi meditate, ‘letting everything go’,” he tells her, striding around in a vicious, predatory circle. “Which you would know if you had an at least halfway-competent teacher.”

Her eyes remained closed, but she almost snorts at him. _Snorts_. “Right.”

Kylo can even feel her disbelief flow through her and into him, but also ire. She thinks him a monster, and an incompetent monster at that.

“Yes,” she sighs. He flinches, and remembers that in this consciousness-reality his mask has disappeared. Could she hear his thoughts as clearly as he could feel what she felt? “Like some monster ready to strike at anything that moves.”

He meets her gaze. There’s something different there, from the last time they met face to face. Well, consciousness to consciousness.

There’s a brief battle of wills. It’s more testing the waters, than an actual battle. It lasts no more than three seconds, both of them pushing as hard as they dare while remaining evenly matched until both of their minds retreat through the bond. “It’s rude to interrupt someone while they are meditating,” she says, closing her eyes again and exhaling through her nose.

“Forgive me,” he bites, crossing his arms. “As you know, this connection isn’t the most convenient for me, either.”

Regardless of how skilled she may be, his molten temper burns while hers is still and cool. Solid. And no matter how hot he burns, he can’t seem to send a ripple through the water. Or a rumble through the earth. Kylo almost wishes that she were grasslands so that she would burn, too.

At her silence, and her perfect, textbook breathing, he paces again.

“Meditation isn’t difficult for someone that’s spent so much time alone,” she tells him, like she’s throwing a bone to some sort of pet. “I can’t even imagine that you _could_ meditate, the state you’re constantly in. Turn it down.”

Kylo frowns, and bites at his lip, turning away. He should be able to feel Skywalker from this distance. Is she blocking him? Could Skywalker sense his presence if he wasn’t physically here? His temper flares even brighter. “Is meditation all he’s taught you?” he asks, scowling. “Two months, and he still has you meditating? I could have you moving TIE fighters by now.”

She peeks one eye open at him, but it isn’t curiosity that he feels slipping through the bond. It’s irritation.

He shrugs her gaze and does another circle, taking in everything around them. A solitary island in the middle of an endless sea— he laughs, viciously, angrily, remembering the first conversation they had where she hadn’t been unconscious. An island. The sea. One of the father-figures from his dead self.

She probably still has his lightsaber, too.

“He isn’t here,” she tells him. He turns back in time to see that both of her eyes are open, looking at him, looking through him, but it doesn’t last.

“Ren,” a voice calls from his side. He blinks, safe behind the mask again. He has to bite down a sudden surge of his anger. Rey’s gone.

He hears her snort at him again, unimpressed.

It was foolish to believe that this connection was one-sided. Obviously from their fourth meeting, Rey receives just as much information as he does from her. Kylo has underestimated her again, and the last time she out-maneuvered him, regardless of the circumstances.

He starts editing his own actions. Unsuccessfully, because the more he does it, the less power he has. Which fuels his anger, which weakens the wall he has erected between them, which lets more slip through to Rey. It is a frustrating storm of hot and cold, of rage and apathy that just manages to make a vein in his forehead throb.

“He’s so angry,” he hears Rey say, out of the blue. He jumps up from where he’s seated in the training arena, panting. Who she’s speaking to, Kylo doesn’t know.

He can’t help it, his outrage pushes back automatically. She must sense were his attention is focused, because he feels the thread of her irritation seep into his spine.

 _Out_ , she thinks at him.

The connection closes, and does not reopen for some time.

His temper grows shorter. His training with the Supreme Leader gets messier, heavier and bloodier and yet the results shrink. The First Order loses a minor base some three months after the loss of Starkiller and he manages to destroy an entire control room in his rage.

And not even that seems to re-open the bond.

His nights are fitful. He dreams of killing Solo over and over, and each time, Rey takes a different place. Sometimes she jumps between them, taking the blade instead, sometimes dying with a shocked scream locked in her throat and sometimes starting the battle they had in the woods. Other times his father clutches at his face and falls, revealing Rey, who was standing right behind him. Sometimes she is the one that cuts his father down while Ben watches, horrified. He wakes up and flings his hands out, shattering the steel supports on the viewing port on the right side of his bed before he even realizes. Alarms start blaring at him, until he breaks them, too.

He does not know if that one is his nightmare, or Rey’s.

Kylo grows more irritable and short tempered, the longer the nightmare persists. He starts avoiding sleep, training harder, bleeding more, until even the Supreme Leader notices his distraction. “Your eye is focused on a far-off star, Kylo Ren.”

He boils his rage in his throat. A mask, so that his Master will not see how close his words are to the truth. “Forgive me, Master. I will rise with your guidance.”

The nightmare fades. Occasionally he’ll catch glimpses of other dreams when he’s in-between sleeping and waking. Rare, stronger flashes come to him when he’s conscious. No emotion. Perhaps Rey has finally learned to shut him out, but even the most skilled of the Jedi would have difficulty doing it while sleeping. 

Something happens after weeks of nothing and he feels Rey bleed, and pain shoots through the bond, forcing it back open. He stops, turns in her direction, but apart from that initial blast of pain? Nothing. He searches the stars for any other clue, standing in the middle of the First Order’s troop formation. But there’s nothing. No bright star imploding. The feeling as gone as soon as it came, but he can’t sense Rey’s death, either. After a moment he continues to his ship, off to a distant planet on his Master’s orders for a purpose that his Master hasn’t explained.

Which is a mistake. He’s more careful around his Master, who sees and hears much more than Skywalker ever did.

Days later, streaks of light are flashing by his viewport before Kylo realizes that he’s in a different place, in a different room, going in a different direction, and the smell of sweat and sand has filled his nose.

He turns around, knowing what’s waiting for him.

“I wish you’d stop,” Rey says. She isn’t quite meditating, but her mind is filled with nothing and openness, so it functions the same for Kylo. “I was so good at keeping you out, and yet here you are.”

They are no longer on the island. Kylo doesn’t know where they are, exactly, a ship perhaps. Not his fa— not Solo’s. He’d know that ship from beneath the grating to the highest point of the Shield Capacitors.

“You were hurt,” he says. “I felt it.”

She holds up her left hand without even looking at him. It’s still wrapped in bandages, but it’s been long enough that it’s healed. He can feel how the scar itches through the bond. Rey says, “Price of flying a smuggler ship, I suppose.”

Kylo takes it in. Her bandage, the objects that are littered through the room. He can’t be positive, but he’s reasonably sure they are the only people on the ship. He wonders why she’s left Skywalker on the island.

“Didn’t leave him,” she answers automatically, with an unconcerned tone in her voice. “Running an errand, that’s all.”

Alone, Rey without her Master, and Kylo without his? A fortunate opportunity that he almost can’t pass up. Even if they are technically speaking face-to-face, hundreds of thousands of miles away from one another.

“Stop it,” she repeats, staring at the object in her hands as she twists it, trying to get it working. “I’ve had enough of your sneaking. Enough of your pain.”

“I don’t want to hurt you, Rey,” he tells her. He’s surprised by the flood of _honesty_ that he feels slipping out of him, through the bond. “I want to teach you. There’s so much you need to learn.”

There’s something burning in her gaze again, and she pushes into his mind with a scream, jumping up from out of her seat and putting a hand against his head, until he can see Han Solo falling from her perspective. He doesn’t resist, but sinks with it.

It’s a reversal of the fight in the snow, Kylo realizes.

“You _killed_ him,” she spits. Her gaze is intense, and he can feel her rage burning as hot as his blade. And yet, it lacks his wavering doubt. Her rage has a purpose to focus on, so it does not consume her. Not unlike how she had pushed back at him in that interrogation room. “You took his life and watched him fall and _did nothing_.”

“Yes,” he says, with little else to say. “I did.”

He half wants to push, to see how deep her anger runs. It seems no matter what, Luke, who keeps his mind so closed to Kylo’s power, has not extinguished her anger. That could be a horrible mistake, on his part. Jealousy might be the thing that made Ben Solo fall, but anger comes in close second.

The other half of him revels in the pain that Rey’s forcing on him. Pain is easy. Guilt, doubt, regret, that’s harder. His wall breaks like it was made of sand under Rey’s will, he feels her flood into his head and fill every crack that Kylo Ren has scratched onto the surface. He won’t lie, being able to feel her rage, but see it boiling on her skin, too, it’s bliss. Rey’s eyes could bore holes through his skull if she felt like it.

It feels like the air between them might just catch fire.

Rey seems to see through him and feel his thoughts and doubles down, pushing him back against the wall. What must this look like to outsiders? This dreamscape? Are they both standing still, locked in their own heads? Her anger is so bright that it hurts his eyes, but he doesn’t close them.

Her strength spends itself, and eventually there’s nothing but a sharp throb along his skin. She doesn’t move her hand from just to the right of his forehead, but she doesn’t move the rest of her either. She’s just looking inside him. Disapproval. Confusion. Hesitation. Anger. Desire.

He leans his head against the metal wall of the ship and inhales. He can feel all of it second-hand through the Force.

But most of all, her anger.

“Can you feel it?” Kylo runs the back of his fingers against her cheek. His touch, harmless, makes her drop her gaze. It’s almost… tender. “All that anger? It’s easy, isn’t it?”

He said the wrong thing, because he feels her control, her wall, fall back down to the earth so hard that it shakes the ground beneath their feet. She flinches and her anger vanishes, and she orders, “ _Out_.”

Kylo starts to yell, no, _he can’t leave now_ , but gets kicked half a million miles across the galaxy, back into his own head. He shatters the console in a shower of sparks.

His anguish consumes him for days. He was so close— _so close_. She deserved a better teacher, to continue her training. He could teach her, they could take on anyone who stood in their way together. Rey’s hatred burned as brightly as his own did and at every step of the way she had proved herself to be his equal. A decade ago that would have wounded him, but now he’s tasted it.

For days and days he feels nothing. No flashes. No emotion. No gentle sea breeze. He paces, incensed, wanting to take his ship from their mission and point it in whichever direction he had sensed her in. Panic fills his chest, because he can’t remember the last time he hasn’t felt the bond constantly at the back of his head.

Except he starts to see her.

More frequently as the days turn into weeks. At the helm of his ship, leaning against the viewports. Staring up at him from his Stormtroopers. Yanking him into a dark hallway where no one can see by the shoulder of his dark cloak.

“I feel you constantly,” she tells him, pacing around him so fast that he has to turn to keep up. “You’re so, so, so _angry_ — all the time, it wakes me up during the night. You hate yourself! You find fault in everything you do and you hate every move you make and you worry and you just don’t _stop_.”

“I know,” he says.

She stares at him, confused, bewildered, for one long second before she rolls her shoulders. Rey closes her eyes, and he watches as she disappears from his mind.

Whatever he’s done to anger her, well, recently, she seems to turn into a game of tormenting him. She appears regularly, just watching him from behind General Hux as he speaks to his Captains. Peering around the corner of his ship as he walks, but of course, when Kylo reached it, she’s gone. When this had all started they had connected by accident, but now, he can’t even feel when Rey materializes. She’s heading in so many directions so quickly that he can’t even track her position anymore.

She appears next to him when his anger rises. Kylo can’t even remember what his Master has him looking for, but many have met their red ends. Solo’s death was supposed to solve this, this hesitation.

Except Rey’s right there. “It’s not too late, you know. To fix it.”

Rey fixes things. He breaks them.

Kylo Ren can see Han Solo saying something similar, on that bridge five months ago. The space just slightly behind his heart stirs in a familiar way. Hesitation. The pull from both sides. It used to rip him apart, but his father’s death has anchored him to something far stronger. “For me, it is.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm taking all of you fuckers with me, I'll tell you what. 
> 
> [tumblr](http://www.valorious.tumblr.com)


End file.
